


colorful with little care

by bee_bro



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Adverse Effects Of Being An Avatar of the Eye: u have to process 200yrs of memories, Character Development Within 2k Words, Character Study, Pride Parade, Trans Elias Bouchard, bitch gets put in PLACE by Self Comprehension, but its just a dead guys flat elias has to visit, elias pulls off being both queer and queerphobic can you believe it i sure can, good vibes from:, mentions of a dead body, mentions of transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23640799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_bro/pseuds/bee_bro
Summary: Elias drops by a pride parade to feed off of the Potential Fear Of Being Seen and gets swiftly reminded of his own rather similar origins. And after he's sucked into the crowd, what can you really do but join?
Comments: 9
Kudos: 60





	colorful with little care

**Author's Note:**

> since this is Elias-centric, this fic (especially the first half) has some mild queerphobic/mean things from his horrid 200yr old man pov  
> personally I do not support the mistreatment of the queer community and tried to reflect a change in attitude from 'horrible' to 'ill give the queers a pass' in elias' inner monologue
> 
> otherwise I'm glad the eye went 'u can have any gender bodey u want' that's really fucken dope of a fear entity, you do you

The now Elias Bouchard wakes up three hours earlier than his norm. This means, that when he sits up in his bed with no natural need for alarm clocks, it is very far from sunrise. All the better, Elias carefully maneuvers through his apartment towards the nearest light switch, mentally insults Raymond as per routine, and sets the kettle. The grogginess of broken routine falls away faster in this younger body but the memory of fingerpads burned with matchsticks, setting the metal kettle to boil after gifting the mansion's lanterns with small, contained fire... Jonah is more haunted in the mornings. 

He goes through his three work emails and seven fake ones, logs into each of his three Facebook accounts and checks up on his staff, associates, enemies - all alike. Drinks coffee, dresses far plainer than mundane, and drives. Wearing jeans is vaguely unfamiliar: they're something this body used to own along with a few graphic t-shirts that have currently been downgraded to kitchen rag status in Elias' life. Yet, he'll go certain lengths to blend in. Sunglasses, cap, nondescript plebian clothes. Elias does not plan to join the parade but he will follow it as a separate individual, observing. Will sit in cafes as the throng of bright colors and lively faces pass by. All in a few hour's time. It just so happens, on purely gracious coincidence, that a flat he needs to break in to sits only a block away from the year's first pride parade. 

The tenant has been dead for five days, yet undiscovered, slowly becoming one with his carpet. Elias locates the key before he even reaches the correct floor: it will be underneath the inbuilt doorstop. Gets into the flat, touches not a single surface, observes the body for a few indulging minutes, and collects what he'd come here for. An object of the Eye and the unfortunate cause for the demise of its earlier possessor. Elias leaves quietly, the heavy metallic pendant resting on the inside of his coat, not dangerous as of now: fed. It's getting bright, and as Elias walks through the brisk spring air, more and more heads of dyed hair and people in various gaudy attire turn up along the streets. He makes direct eye contact with each and every one, keeping his expression blank and marveling at what they interpret from it either way. Mostly judgment or hatred, no matter how genuinely void of feeling he makes the stare. Ah, the paranoia of a minority- Elias almost chuckles to himself, the ghosts of familiarity clinging onto his thoughts. He expels them and instead picks up tidbits of the most trivial pain from whoever is most unfortunate to share his side of the street.

Someone's lost their grocery discount card. Someone's scared of their own parents. Marvelous the breadth of ages he encounters as he draws closer and closer to the soon epicenter. There are those who've met and confronted their less socially welcomed sides at barely coherent ages, others who are just beginning to do so. Elias prefers to not identify with either group, as the only less conventional aspect of himself he'd ever had to face was a manic kind of hunger for academia. His parents were rather unimpressed. Elias picks a coffee shop with tall, clear windows, orders himself something small as a placeholder, and takes a seat to watch. 

People magnetize towards each other from side streets and parking lots and subway exits, pouring into the open space without an ounce of recognition towards each other yet with the already established air of understanding. Elias barely touches his drink, falling progressively more and more into the turmoil of energy as it accumulates with every joining individual, more, more, more: they build a unity on the foundation of shared suffering. Hilarious! Elias smirks into the back of his hand, hilarious how they allow such vulnerability... gathering all in one place... ha! The voice in his head is one he knows well, a voice that had been lamenting the new age politics and the gentle fading-away of gentleman manners across centuries. The voice that had harangued Jonah to hell and back, banning him effectively until the end of time from returning to the family estate. All for the better- Elias thinks, now, as had his father not booted him out of the bloodline, Elias wouldn't have picked the admittedly very appealing name "Jonah Magnus" (hence there would also be no Magnus Institute, which is also a very good name), nor would he have met some of his more enlightening acquaintances with new ideas and old gods. 

Elias shifts and the weight of the pendant shifts with him, pulling his overcoat to slant. He cannot be angry at an object of his God. Nor at his God at all. Or. He can. But he won't. It's a mutual kind of tolerance - he'd like to believe. The Eye grants him a cheat for death and the bodies he wants and Elias provides it with a spectacular level of worship. The panopticon hums in a way no employee will ever hear, yet some meteorologists in the area find their readings rather jumbled. The Eye is strong with Elias and Elias is made strong with the Eye. Yes. Do not bite the hand that feeds you. 

There's a considerable crowd now, some drifting into the coffee shop Elias had chosen. Some approach his table to ask for the vacant chairs but the way Elias can look at them leaves nothing to be said. They smile like rabbits in a snare and back away, and he revels in that - even as they march and party with their friends afterward, his cold, unfitting eyes will be at the forefront of their minds.

When the procession moves off, Elias follows. Just off the sides, just under the radar- he's the accidental passerby to a public event. He is not a part of them, as they pump signs into the air, as they make their way down street after street, as they wear clothes that remain hidden in closets for the rest of the year, ones they don now and will never show to their coworkers or parents... Elias finds himself smirking with every fiber of knowledge he can hook on to. Personal drama is vivid in throngs like this and it is delicious- years of repression and the euphoria of becoming something more true. He averts the ones that have come with their parents, he does not want to see. 

Elias knows that since his allegiance with the Eye, his own sight had improved in, yes, the metaphorical terms, but the physical as well. He'd watched Gertrude once set her glasses down and never return to pick them up. Is soon to watch Jon do the same. Under his birth name, he'd had rather clunky glasses his parents commonly made him disregard in favor of aesthetics. After the first threads to the Eye, Jonah had worn reading glasses, then none at all, then had learned that colors were deeper, glowing almost, now. That he could see further and in more detail. Visual innovation on the most basic biological level. Elias watches arrays of flags flow in the wind and recognizes patterns both from exposure and from reflexive knowledge. He sometimes walks faster, sometimes slower, absorbing human emotion and finding its excessive presence a weakness. 

No matter how many stops or speed-walks he makes, Elias is, consciously but unintentionally, drawn to the whisps of blue, pink, white, and then again pink, blue, gentle, symmetrical, and again there's the singe of matchsticks on his fingers and the snip snip of cutting locks of hair off at a dingy mirror in the servant kitchen where his parents would never think to step foot. And Jonah is haunted now in a crowd of people, lost momentarily in something that had surely happened to someone else- and it had. Who his parents doted on and pampered with pearls and silks wasn't Jonah. Hadn't been, but had been trying to become. Surely, Elias now thinks, these memories are not his. 

He'd always had an affinity to the methodic memorization of serious, real, universal knowledge. Even before the powers of the Eye, Jonah had simply known far far more than a casual reading of encyclopedias should have granted. Yet, amidst the stratifiable knowledge of scientific work, his regard to his personal life had lacked. Jonah was a very long time ago. So was every other name he'd ever carried. Many memories of personal life and indulgence lost to time and work. Surely, surely, what Elias is remembering now is far from something that could have happened to him... 

He'd lost track of himself, deep in thought, had walked into a group of friends and pivoted immediately, alas to the wrong side. Instead of the edges, Elias had ended up in the midst.

Elias looks around rather frantically, not the tallest in his current form, he prefers to avoid close crowds. Doesn't like humans in general. Yet it's a one-way road and he's being pulled along it by a smiling crowd. Someone hands Elias stickers, someone else, passing by, drapes upon his shoulders a lime green feather boa, even more on their own shoulders as they hand them out. Elias cannot run, and he comes to know that yes, he had indeed forgotten many years of his life, had let them chill him in fragments and shards and only in the mornings. Yet, reluctantly so, he begins to know that it had been his own hands to hold scissors to his hair and steal a set boy's clothing from a family staying over. Mm, the weight of the pendant in his coat is not more grounding than the boa. Elias hates crowds, hates the visibility that the young generation is granted when he had spent a decade and a half skipping town in crippling fear and trying to settle on a name he liked. Yes, yes, Jonah Magnus. The great Jonah Magnus.

Whoever is walking to his left to his right behind him and in front, they cannot compare to the great Jonah Magnus who built himself and his place of service to God with bare bloody hands. Blood his own and others, the kind thicker than water. The people around him cannot be the same. And yet...

Elias finds his way home only far later. He remembers every single name and face he'd met, but thus is what rules him. He debates keeping the boa, yet knows that if he is to bring it home the amount of disgust he will later feel for it - perhaps the next morning - will be disproportionate. He tosses it, tosses the confetti that's been stuffed into his collar, tosses the manic smile of hours of chanting off his face. Home is where he will change into normal clothes, wash the jeans, and hide them away again. Most likely, they will not see the light of day for many more years. It is rare that he has to dress civilian. And god forbid one of his new, more brash employees were to witness him in... jeans. Elias feels bodily ill at the thought and rushes to change out of them. 

The pendant against his chest is unnaturally warm, like an artificial heart or a palm. Elias will have it in artifact storage next thing tomorrow.

The now Elias Bouchard sinks down into his sofa far more disjointedly than the norm. It's less physical exhaustion and more mental... A rarity, he remarks. Elias can read hours of parchment in the worst chicken-scratch cursive French and not be bothered. As it seems, however, walking with a deeply emotional crowd for four hours is what can really do him in. 

He will make tea, work, and then sleep his one designated hour, and there will be no singe of match fire on his hands from a past he'd buried under years of academic study. The Eye grants the power of knowledge yet the fear of being seen, and Elias supposed that he hadn't been chosen only for his scholarly virtues. He must have been a treat, so deeply terrified of being cracked and outed, having to run again. He lapses into memory, aware that in a few years he will most likely forget it all again. Humans can't remember ten years ago clearly and Elias has to deal with two hundred. Especially when much of that is names he needs to keep track of, phone numbers, locations, events, long term plans

.. He supposes he's always been more of the my-work-and-I mindset, rather than of seeing himself separate from it. Fair. 

He rechecks his emails, lazily does so again with Facebook, then his multiple Twitter accounts, finally going back to ruminate over Excel for hours in deep satisfaction.

Elias goes to sleep with the overcast of other people's thoughts he'd learned maybe too much of today. Thoughts on belonging and identity and, as strange yet prevalent as it would seem, on the powers to shapeshift. He had stopped making his Special eye contact with people in the crowd at some point then, had just let them be without the nagging twinkle of anxiety, the feeling of being deeply scrutinized, watched, preyed upon. All too familiar. The now Elias Bouchard has put many temporal miles between himself and whatever he, unfortunately, existed as before Jonah Magnus. He is comfortable now, as comfortable as one can be under a pensive yet cruel god - no matter the lack of dramatics between himself and the Eye. He falls into a vaguely unnecessary mentally refreshing sleep. His dreams are colorful and that will be it for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> transrights but elias bitch-shard can stfu w his victorian opinions


End file.
